The Media Project is a network of mainstream journalists who are Christians pursuing accurate and intellectually honest reporting on all aspects of culture, particularly the role of religion in public life in all corners of the world. It welcomes friends from other faiths to such discussions and training.

Dec 9

Dec 9 European Secularism Imperils Religious Freedom

Liberal Europe’s secular project and its pandering to potentiallyviolent Islamist critics has imperiled religious freedom, said Dr.
Jenny Taylor in Prague at the conference on Understanding and Reporting
on Religion in Europe.

Taylor, founder of Lapido Media,
which works for religious literacy in the media, had been covering
racial issues in Europe for some time when she realized that religion,
not race, was the real story. She also noticed that European media were
missing this story because they did not understand or respect religion.

“I discovered how badly religion was being covered throughout the
media - and how central it was to the way the world turns and is
turning,” said Taylor.

The religious ground was shifting under Europeans’ feet, but no one
seemed to notice. Taylor says that the number of Muslims in Europe now
stands at approximately 54 million, or approaching ten percent of the
population. Statistics cited for Britain’s Muslim population are
probably unreliable, having remained steady at 1.6 million, or 3.4% of
the population, for about a decade.

Religious illiteracy afflicts European governments, as well, Taylor
said. European political systems take a view of blind “neutrality”
toward all religions. This approach is faulty, Taylor argues, because
it assumes that religions have no substantive differences.

This blind neutrality ignores Islam’s very troubled track record on
press freedom, Taylor said. Of the 20 countries at the bottom of the
Reporters without Borders Index of Press Freedom,
half are Muslim. These same countries, especially Pakistan and Somalia,
provide a high proportion of migrants to the European Union.

Yet Europe’s public institutions lack the discourse and will to address the religious aspects of culture.

“Europe convinced itself, exceptionally, that religion was a thing
of the past, a phenomenon of patriarchalism and oppression,” said
Taylor. “Islam did not exist as a political reality, because we had
ideologically blinded ourselves to it.”

Taylor argues that Europe’s media are beginning to accommodate the
strictures of these immigrant communities out of fear and ignorance.
This accommodation threatens freedom of expression and religion.

She cites the example of the novel Fatima’s Scarf,
which was written by a respected journalist and was critical of Islam.
Publishers praised it in private but abandoned it publicly out of fear
of Muslim backlash, Taylor claims.

In another more recent case, police attempted to prosecute British
documentary journalists for inciting racial hatred because they had
secretly recorded teachings in Birmingham’s Green Lane mosque. The
recordings captured imams advocating bigotry, intolerance and violence.
While police went after the journalists, authorities made no effort to
deal with the Wahhabi mosque where the teachings took place.

She also told of the threatened arrest of two evangelists for hate
crimes. The evangelists had handed out Christian reading material in an
area the Community Support Officer who threatened them - a Muslim -
declared to be a “Muslim area.”

Taylor insists there is a simple reason for these cases.

“This secularism which still dominates the thinking of our European
rulers…is no match for ambitious Islam,” said Taylor. “It ends up
pandering to it, out of fear of violence.”

Under these circumstances, Taylor sees an urgent need for Christian
journalists to commit to the cause of telling the truth. Above all,
Christians should avoid a ghetto mentality and not retreat to the
Christian media.

“That is because the Church is where the poor are, and that is where
God is transforming lives,” Taylor said. “We have special access and
insight into the roots of suffering and poverty - and those are world
issues. That’s where the news is.”

For Taylor, the debate hinges on the question of which religious
factors promote press freedom and which ones do not. She finds the
answer in the Index of Press Freedom. Whereas the nations at the bottom
of this index tend to be Muslim, 14 of the 20 nations at the top of the
index have Protestant Christian majorities.

She suggests that Christians who enter the news industry must show
that freedom of conscience and speech is under attack by secular
governments that are afraid of Muslim violence.

“Avoiding this task could have catastrophic consequences,” Taylor
concluded. “Truth, in an ideologically or Islamically pressured
context, is what the police will allow.”